We Were the Mulvaneys (34 page)

I
n this way I became, at the age of sixteen, a sophomore in high school, an accomplice to my brother Patrick's premeditated crime. I was what you'd call an accessory before the fact and an accessory after the fact. I was what you'd call a co-conspirator. I became an accomplice not at the time of our initial conversation, nor at the time of the second, when Patrick confided in me that I was the only person in the world he could trust!—but in the interim between the conversations. In a trance of several days, day and night. Thinking
Whatever he wants I'll do it. If he wants me to pull the trigger myself I'll do it.

I believed I'd always known that Zachary Lundt would have to be punished. I'd thought it would happen the way lightning strikes, that someone would do it—my father, or Mike Jr. I hadn't thought that Patrick would do it, or that I would be involved. Me, Judd! But as soon as Patrick confided in me, I understood that Patrick was the only Mulvaney capable of executing justice in the way it required execution. Not as a sudden, impulsive act of violence, like wildfire springing up to consume us all, but as a coolly premeditated act from which the perpetrator would walk away unscathed. For nothing less than
perfect
would satisfy Patrick.

There wasn't an hour in all the hours to come, between my decision in early December 1978 and the “execution” itself in March 1979 that I once thought of not helping Patrick; of backing out, telling him I'd changed my mind, I was scared, or disapproving. I thought
It will be dangerous!
I thought
We could both be hurt!
But I never thought
No I can't do it, I won't.

 

My life away from High Point Farm was the dream and my life at High Point Farm and in my thoughts was the real life.

Like, even now, so many years later, I'm at my place of work—in this space that's designated mine—and I'll glance up, I've maybe forgotten the time if I've been working late, past dark—and I think about going home—
home
: to High Point Farm.

At Mt. Ephraim High, Judd Mulvaney was a quiet, skinny kid with a sly sense of humor. Already, as a sophomore, a co-editor of the school newspaper and features editor of the yearbook. Possibly good enough for the junior varsity basketball team but he didn't try out—told the coach he had too many chores to do at home, which was true. His grades were high in some subjects (English, history) and about average in others (math, science). A habit of drifting off at lunchtime, not eating in the cafeteria and maybe not eating at all. A habit of frowning in class, running his fingers over his jaws that were broken out in dull reddened bumps. Brown hair, mud-brown eyes. I guess I wasn't bad-looking for my age but I shrank from being seen. I turned down invitations to parties in town figuring my classmates, especially the girls, weren't serious—why bother with
me
? At the same time I was goddamned vain, my heart pounded in rage I wasn't more special, as I deserved.
Judson Andrew Mulvaney.

In the foyer of the high school, in the big glass trophy case that's like a church altar, there was the photograph, still, of “Mule” Mulvaney and his padded-jersey teammates, Tri-County Football Champions 1972. Every one of my teachers remembered Patrick, for sure, and wore me out asking after him. (“Most brilliant kid I ever taught,” Mr. Farolino was forever saying, with a droll shake of his head. “He could be a real pain in the rear, though!”)

If my teachers remembered Marianne, they didn't ask after her.

Nor did they ask after Dad and Mom as they'd once done. After Dad's arrest, and the hearing, and the two-year “probation,” and a fine of fifteen hundred dollars, and all the stuff in the local papers—not a word. After Mom resigned her P.T.A. office and stopped coming to meetings—not a word.

So I'd want to scream at them. Damn you all! Don't you pity
us
.

We're the Mulvaneys.

 

It was true, High Point Farm would have to be sold.

Except: at what price? Who would buy? To pay off Dad's debts and keep Mulvaney Roofing afloat, my parents had been selling the property piecemeal, only four acres remained. The house, which Mom spoke of as a “historic monument,” and the outbuildings, most of which needed repair.

On a farm, everything needs repair continuously. Buildings, machines, orchards, fences. You can calculate the health of a farm by its fences. When things start to go bad, fences are the first to show it.

The days were long gone, when Mom would organize a “scout team” of us kids, to tramp the fields checking out the fences, repairing what we could. What we couldn't, Dad would repair. And what Dad couldn't, he'd have done by someone who could.

Now, even the front split-rail fence bordering High Point Farm was falling down in sections. It hadn't been white in years. More the color of damp moldering newsprint, overgrown in a tangle of briars and vines.

The house that was so beautiful in our eyes wasn't beautiful really. The shutters had begun to sag, the slate roofs needed repair. The pale lavender color Mom loved so wasn't practical for our climate and faded after two or three years. It must have been at least five years since the house had been painted so Mom fretted: how could we hope to sell the house for a decent price if it looked bad on the outside? On the other hand, why spend money and time repairing a house you won't be living in much longer? Could we really afford fifteen to twenty gallons of expensive oil-base paint, the kind required for old, dry wood? And the labor? (Long gone too were the days when Dad would recruit his crew of Mulvaney housepainters, Mike, Patrick, me, and Dad our foreman, and devote six weeks in the summer to radical home improvement.) The orchards needed pruning, the ponds needed dredging. Every one of the farm machines had something wrong with it. The local men Dad hired to help out were unreliable if not dishonest, pilfering hand tools, buckets of grain and seed, even hens' eggs out of the coop. (Mom swore she'd caught old Zimmerman with broken eggs in his overall pockets, yolks seeping through the denim. Mom said, You can't trust these men, don't leave me alone with these men, they're drinkers, they're wife-beaters, I'm terrified of them. Which wasn't like Corinne Mulvaney who'd never been afraid of anyone in the past, laughed at the notion of locking any door, at any time. Now she was forever calling, “Judd? Where are you? Is that you?
Judd?
”)

I won't go into the health of the livestock. If you know farm animals, you know all about that.

In these desperate months when he was (a fact I wasn't supposed to know) trying to stave off bankruptcy, my father hadn't time for farm chores; or was impatient to a point just short of mania if he had to do them. He was breathless, panting, angry. His disheveled graying hair like steel wool, carelessly shaved jaws, a glisten at the corners of his mouth like spittle. His clothes were the same sportily stylish clothes he'd always worn but they were rumpled, as if he'd crushed them in his fists, and in need of laundering or dry cleaning. His boots were mud-spattered, his shoes in need of shining. The glamorous almost-new Lincoln he drove was mud-spattered too. I'd hear him start the engine, turning the key in the ignition in some weird way that made a squealing sound as of protest, as if he'd forgotten the rudiments of driving, or was distracted by malevolent thoughts. Once he stormed into the house where I was doing something in the kitchen, tossed his car keys onto the table and said, glaring at me, “Take the pile of shit, you're welcome to it.” Slammed upstairs and half hour later slammed down again, looking for the keys, of course, and they were exactly where he'd tossed them onto the table, untouched by me.

Where always in the past Dad had been courtly to Mom, to the point of embarrassing us kids, now he was indifferent, or rude; or worse. He didn't like her questioning him and grew into the habit of cutting her off in midsentence—“No!” he'd say, or “Who wants to know?” Once I saw him shove Mom aside when she'd dared to touch him, just her fingers on his arm. Another time I saw him lean close to her, his boiled-looking face brought to within an inch of her face, and he said something to her in a low, contemptuous voice that made her wince as if he'd kicked her in the stomach. (If I asked Mom afterward what had happened, Mom would say, hurt, “Nothing ‘happened.' And I'll thank you not to spy on us, young man!”)

This I remember vividly: seeing my father pitching manure in the barnyard, in the awkward, uncoordinated way of a man who's never held a pitchfork in his hands before, and suddenly in disgust throwing the pitchfork against the side of the hay barn with such force that for several fantastic seconds the heavy object actually held, quivering, before falling to the ground.

I'd just emerged from the stable. I couldn't help clapping—I guess I was a smart-ass, unless I just wanted to pretend that such wild, futile behavior on my dad's part was for laughs as in the old days it might possibly have been.
Way to go, Dad! Betcha can't do that again!

But Dad hadn't heard. Already he'd stalked off, gone to climb into the Lincoln and drive the hell away from High Point Farm and all it had come to mean to him.

I told Mom, “I'm scared of Dad. I wish he'd go away somewhere by himself and
stay
.”

Mom said, her eyes welling with tears, “
You! You
go away if you're not happy in this house.”

News of such incidents I would relay to Patrick, who'd given me a secret telephone number I could use to call him. (Actually, it was a lab number. Sometimes he was there, and sometimes not, and if not I was to hang up without identifying myself.) “I'm scared of Dad,” I said, aggrieved. “I wish he'd go away somewhere by himself and—” Patrick interrupted, in cool Pinch-style, “Look, Judd, our father is just a casualty. He's one of those frogs whose life is sucked out of them without them having a clue what's going on, by a giant water spider.”

 

Michael Mulvaney Sr. escaped going to Red Bank Correctional Facility for Men but he didn't escape what he'd come to call his fate: to be dragged publicly through shit, to
be
shit in others' eyes. It was not his belief and would never be his belief that he'd committed any crime when he'd tossed a few ounces of beer into Judge Kirkland's face, still less that he'd committed any crime when, the previous year, he'd slammed Zachary Lundt against a wall—these were “provoked” acts for which he felt not the slightest repentance. He'd paid a fine of $1,500 but this fine was what he called a “mere fraction” of his punishment. For he'd become involved in the hiring and firing of lawyers like an obsessed man—hiring the “initial error,” as he said, and firing its “compounding.” Yet he kept hiring lawyers, and each lawyer Dad hired he had to pay, pay, pay. One week he'd be speaking rapturously of someone from Yewville named Costello, the next week someone from Rochester named Elder; the next week, Costello and Elder were out, and Fenwick, “a real shark,” was in. Lawyers terrified my mother because she perceived that they thrived on others' misery; she was the daughter of farmers and could not tolerate a profession that “produces nothing, but only takes.” She who hadn't wept when three of our horses were taken away to auction (at least, she hadn't wept in front of me) wept when my father boasted of his legal strategies to her. He was going to sue that hypocrite Kirkland! He was going to sue the Mt. Ephraim Country Club! He was going to sue the Mt. Ephraim police—for false arrest! And the
Patriot-Ledger
, for libel! Each lawyer provided my father with hope of redressing his terrible hurt; but it was hope lethal to him as solid food to a man whose stomach has shrunken from starvation. There was even a week or so in January 1979 when Dad was initiating a suit against one of his former lawyers charging “legal malpractice” and during this time my parents quarrelled as I'd never heard them quarrel before in my life. My mother was furious that my father was squandering money on lawyers and my father insisted he could win it all back, and more—didn't he have justice on his side?

At the same time Dad seemed to have no illusions, and no hope. By day, cold sober, he had no hope. He was a man going through the motions of attacking others, a man with no hope. He seemed to have forgotten Marianne entirely, what had been done to her that was the cause of all our trouble, his excited focus was a small circle of men in Mt. Ephraim who'd wronged him, and continued to wrong him. He warned me, “As soon as you're involved with the law, son, they've got you. Like a rat trapped in a corner by dogs. Innocent or guilty, you're going to be punished because you have to hire a lawyer, and as soon as you hire a lawyer you're going to pay, pay, pay. It doesn't matter if you're innocent and you win—you lose. You pay, pay, pay.”

In the end, in spring 1979, High Point Farms would be sold thousands of dollar below the realtors' suggested price, to pay my parents' debts, thirty-two thousand dollars of which were legal debts.

 

After Christmas, Mom and I drove to Kilburn to visit with Marianne. Again, my sister hadn't been invited home for the holidays. I did most of the driving in Mom's Buick station wagon and kept hearing Patrick's voice
Judd you're the only person I can trust in the world Judd you're the only person I can trust in the world
beneath Mom's nervous chatter.